The present disclosure relates generally to Virtual Extensible LANs (VXLAN). More particularly, the present disclosure relates to methods and systems for auto-discovery of VXLAN tunnel endpoints (VTEPs) using a protocol-independent multicast (PIM) bootstrap router (BSR).
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use, such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Network segmentation may be provided through VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks). A VLAN may be any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer (OSI Layer 2). Essentially, VLANs are a set of hosts or a single host that are assigned to a different VLAN ID in order to segment traffic from each other. If these hosts desired to communicate with each other, inter-VLAN routing may be used. VLANS have inherent limitations including inefficient network inter-links with only Layer 2 operation, spanning tree limitations, physical location of devices, limited number of VLANs, multi-tenant environments, and ToR (Top of Rack) switch scalability. To address many of these issues, a virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) was introduced to support virtualization of networks and resources. VXLAN provides a Layer 2 overlay mechanism on an existing Layer 3 network by encapsulating the Layer 2 frames in Layer 3 packets. More specifically, VXLAN uses a VLAN-like encapsulation technique to encapsulate OSI Layer 2 Ethernet frames within Layer 4 UDP datagrams, using 4789 as the default IANA-assigned destination UDP port number. (IANA is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) VXLAN endpoints, which terminate VXLAN tunnels, may be either virtual or physical switch ports, are known as VXLAN tunnel endpoints (VTEPs).
When it comes to VTEP discoveries, there are two approaches: Dynamic and Static. Static VXLAN deployments may have a limitation, i.e., a pain point, of requiring a manual configuration of the remote VTEPs and their associated VXLAN VNID (virtual network ID) segments in the network. Without this manual configuration, VTEP may not learn the presence of host VMs or may not create the flood-list to send broadcast, unknown-unicast and multicast traffic (BUM traffic) to all the hosts in a virtual machine (VM) segment.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a mechanism by which all VTEPs and their associated virtual networks (VNs) are auto-discovered in static VXLAN deployments.